News

Monday, November 29, 2004

What a wonderful Thanksgiving! We got to visit with everyone on both sides of the family. An awesome Thanksgiving feast with the Bergeron family, bowling with Kameron and Neo, eating boiled crawfish at Camile's in Baton Rouge with the Graffagnino family, and going to the children's museum in Lafayette with Neo and Mr. Troy were some of the highlights. All of the pictures can be found here.

If people have other pictures, please send them to me at frankie@graffagnino.net. If you have too many to email, let me know and I can arrange another delivery method.

I just got back from a trip to Canada. I went up to MD Robotics to watch the installation of strain guages on the shuttle robotic arm for a project I have been working on. The trip was wonderful. The people at MDR are extremely nice and made a point to show me around and make sure I had a good time.

Wednesday night they brought me to a hockey game for a league that many employees play in. There were three games. The last game is what is known as the "heckle" game - everyone from the first two games grabs a beer and proceeds to heckle everyone playing in the third game. It was very fun. It was nice to see and meet all of those people outside of the context of work.

Since we were in the clean room much of the time, I was also able to grab a few pictures. This one is a picture of the group I was working with next to arm no. 303. 303 is a very symbolic arm to me since it was the arm that installed the SSRMS onto the station, effectively handing off to a new generation of space robotics. If everything goes right, this arm (along with our project) will fly on STS-121 next year.